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Setting aside Valve's VR mini-game collection The Lab, it's been over three years since the once mighty games developer released its last full-fat video game—the e-sports MOBA Dota 2. Its last single-player, story-driven game, Portal 2, was released in 2011. So expectations have been low for the announcement of any new Valve games, with even the fabled Half-Life 3 relegated to mere Internet meme.

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It comes as something of a surprise, then, to hear Valve confirm it isn't just working on one new game—it's working on three. Moreover, while all three games are being developed specifically for VR, they won't be short, throwaway experiences like those in The Lab. They are, according to Valve founder and padre to PC gaming Gabe Newell, "full games."

"Right now we're building three VR games," Newell told reporters at a roundtable discussion at its offices in Seattle. "When I say we're building three games, we're building three full games, not experiments."

Details on the games were kept secret, although Newell did confirm they're being built in both Unity and the company's own Source 2 game engine.

Newell went on to discuss Valve's development philosophy for VR, reiterating previous comments that the company sees VR as a true replacement for the keyboard and mouse that gamers have "been stuck with mouse and keyboard for a reeeaaally [sic] long time." Taking a leaf from Nintendo's playbook, he also made clear that VR games development and hardware development go hand-in-hand.

"One of the questions you might be asking is 'Why in the world would you be making hardware?'" Newell said. "What we can do now is we can be designing hardware at the same time that we're designing software. This is something that [Nintendo's Shigeru] Miyamoto has always had. He's had the ability to think about what the input device is and design a system while he designs games. Our sense is that this will actually allow us to build much better entertainment experiences for people."

While Valve remains optimistic about the future of VR, numerous—if unconfirmed—projected figures from research firms like SuperData point towards lower than expected sales for all headsets. PlayStation VR was said to have shifted roughly 745,000 units last year, nearly double that of HTC's Vive at 420,000 units, with the Oculus Rift apparently trailing behind in third place at 355,000 units.

Upcoming headsets like Lenovo’s Windows Holographic headset promise to broaden the market by bringing the cost down for consumers. The headset is currently pegged for a £350 launch price—although Newell is not entirely convinced this will necessarily increase VR's install-base.

About that travel ban...

Newell also weighed in on US president Donald Trump's controversial travel ban, which blocked citizens and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US, or receiving travel visas. The ban currently remains suspended.

"We have people who work at Valve who can't go home," he said. "They've been here for years. They pay taxes. They cheer for New England in the Super Bowl and we try to not hold that against them...

"But you know, they can't leave the country. So, like, there's some event outside the country, and for the first time we say: 'Wait, they can't go because they can't get back.' So that's a problem, not just these hypothetical future employees but actual Valve employees. So yeah, that's a concern for us."

"If you took the existing VR systems and made them 80 per cent cheaper there's still not a huge market, right?," said Newell. "There's still not an incredibly compelling reason for people to spend 20 hours a day in VR. Once you've got something, the thing that really causes millions of people to be excited about it, then you start worrying about cost reducing. It's sort of the old joke that premature cost reduction is the root of all evil."

He added: "We're actually going to go from this weird position where VR right now is kind of low-res, to being in a place where VR is actually higher res than just about anything else, with much higher refresh rates than you're going to see on either desktops or phones. You'll actually see the VR industry sort of leapfrogging pretty much any other display technology in terms of those characteristics. It's probably not obvious from the first generation of products, but you'll start to see that happening in 2018-2019."

Which is all well and good. But for PC gamers that grew up with a Valve that made groundbreaking games like Half-Life and Portal, hardware talk isn't so compelling. Here's hoping that, whatever those three games it's working on might be, they live up to the developer's commanding legacy.